On the Night of the Seventh Moon

Meanwhile I turned to Ilse, more excited than I had been since I came home. She was about the age my mother would have been and she talked of life at the Damenstift and the games they had played in the little schloss where they had lived and how my mother’s family had visited hers and how they had ridden their ponies in the forest.

I felt a deep sense of nostalgia.

The wine was brought-last year’s brew which Aunt Caroline reckoned would be ready for the drinking, and the fresh wine biscuits which she had baked the day before. She glanced significantly at me to make sure that I was realizing how important it was to be prepared with wine and biscuits for unexpected visitors.

Ilse then turned her attention to Aunt Caroline, praised the wine, which pleased her, and asked for a recipe for the biscuits.

So altogether the three of us were pleased with the visit.

That was a beginning. They had taken lodgings in the town and the aunts and myself were soon invited to dine with them. This was exciting and the aunts enjoyed it, although Aunt Caroline did think they had some outlandish ways.

I enjoyed most the times when I could be alone with them. I talked constantly about my mother and how she had met my father when he was on his walking tour. They were very interested. I told them about the Damenstift and the different nuns; in fact I realized that I talked a great deal about myself far more than they did about their lives.

They did, though, bring back to me very vividly the enchantment of the forest; and I could sense the change in myself. I was more like the girl I had been before I came back to find my life so sadly changed. Not a word did I say of my adventure in the mist but I was thinking of it; and the night after that first day of their arrival I dreamed of it all so vividly that it was like living it again.

The days passed all too quickly and not one of them without a meeting with the Gleibergs. I told them how very sad I was that they would soon be leaving; Ilse said she would miss me too. It was Ilse to whom I had grown so close-identifying her with my mother. She began to tell me stories of their childhood together, all the little jaunts and customs which my mother had mentioned; and little incidents concerning Lili, as she called her, of which I had never heard before.

About a week before they were due to leave she said to me: “How I wish you could come back with us for a visit.”

The joy in my face seemed to startle her.

“Would you really like it so much?” she asked, well pleased.

“More than anything on earth,” I said vehemently.

“Perhaps it could be arranged.”

“The aunts, I began.

She put her head on one side and lifted her shoulders; a gesture she used frequently.

“I could pay my fare,” I said eagerly.

“I have some money.”

“That would not be necessary. You would be our guest, of course.”

She put her finger to her lips as though something had occurred to her.

“Ernst, she said.

“I am concerned about his health. If I could have a travelling companion it was an idea.

I broached it to the aunts during luncheon.

“Cousin Ilse is worried about Ernst,” I told them.

“I don’t wonder at it. Hearts are funny things,” said Aunt Matilda.

“It’s travelling. She says it’s a burden for one.”

“She might have thought of that before she left her home,” said Aunt Caroline, who thought every adversity which befell others was their own fault and only those which came to her due to unavoidable ill fortune.

“She brought him to see a doctor.”

“The best of them are here,” said Aunt Matilda proudly.

“I remember Mrs. Corsair’s going up to London to see a specialist. I won’t mention what ailed her, but...

” She looked significantly at me.

“Cousin Ilse would like someone to help her on the journey. She suggested I go.”

“You!”

“Well, it would be such a help and in view of Cousin Ernst’s complaint”

“Hearts are very funny things,” from Aunt Matilda.

“Unreliable more so than lungs, though you can’t be sure of lungs either.”

“Well, I’ve no doubt it would be a help to her but why should you go tramping out to outlandish places?”

“Perhaps because I’d like to. I’d like to be of use to her. After all, she is my mother’s cousin.”

“That’s what comes of marrying foreigners,” said Aunt Caroline.

“Someone who understands hearts would be very useful now,” said Aunt Matilda speculatively. Good heavens, I thought. She’s not suggesting she should go?

She was. Her love of disease would carry her even to such lengths.

Aunt Caroline was horrified and this was fortunate, for I was sure that because of this veiled suggestion of her sister’s she viewed my departure with less dismay.

“How would you get back?” demanded Aunt Caroline triumphantly.

“By train, by sea.”

“Alone! A young girl travelling alone!”

“People do. And it’s not as though it’s my first visit. The Grevilles might be coming out again. I could wait for them and travel back with them perhaps.”

“It all seems very outlandish to me,” said Aunt Caroline.

But I was determined to go; and I think that Aunt Caroline realized that I had my mother’s determination ‘stubbornness,” she called it-and once I had made up my mind I would go. Aunt Matilda was in a way on my side because she was certain that when you travelled with a ‘heart’ more than one pair of hands would be needed if things went wrong. So it happened that at the end of the month of June when the Gleibergs left England I was with them.

THREE

I was in a state of exultation. Some strange transformation had come to me on that night in the hunting lodge and I would never be quite the same again. I sometimes believed that I had supped with the gods or one of them at least. He belonged in Asgarth with Odin and Thor; he would be as bold and brave and as wicked and ruthless as any of them.

He had taken possession of my mind so that I was like the knight-at-arms who had met the belle dame sans merci.

“Alone and palely loitering’ I would wander the earth ever more until I found him.

How foolish one could be! Yet on the other hand if I could retrace my steps in some ways, if I could prove to myself that what I had met on that night was not a god but a man who was not very scrupulous and might have submitted me to that to which I am sure people like my aunts would think death preferable, I believed I might throw off this spell which now bound me. I would return to Oxford and learn to be a good housewife. I might be a spinster who looked after the aunts for the rest of their lives; or I might marry and have a family and bring them up to be respectable citizens. My daughters should never be sent to a Damenstift in the pine forests for fear one day they should be lost in the mist and captured by a wicked baron, for who could be sure that the good angel in the guise of a Hildegarde would always be there?

We travelled through the familiar country and as I smelt the pines my spirits rose. At length we came to the little station of Lokenburg. A trap took us and our luggage to their house.

How excited I was to be in Lokenburg-a typical south German town.

There were a few new houses which had been recently built on the outskirts in the Altstadt. It seemed to have come right out of a fairy tale-with its arcaded streets and look of the middle ages.

“It’s beautiful!” I cried, gazing at the high roofs and gabled houses, with little domes capping the turrets and the window-boxes on the window-ledges overflowing with flowers. There was the market-place with a pond in the centre and in which a fountain played; and from the shops hung iron signs creaking in the wind with the quaint pictures on them indicating the various trades.